


Keep Your Course

by Cherepashka



Series: Fëanorian Week 2019 [3]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Ecology lessons from river spirits, Fëanorian Week 2019, Gen, Graphic depiction of predators killing prey, Hunting, Second Kinslaying | Sack of Doriath, Wolves, elk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-12-07 21:29:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18240407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: Two hunts: One in the woods of Himlad, in the early years of the First Age, and another, much later, in the caverns of Menegroth.





	Keep Your Course

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fëanorian Week 2019, for the prompt: Celegorm – Hunting.
> 
> (Late post due to real-life events.)

The woods of Himlad brimmed with life: the calls of birds seeking for a mate, the trees murmuring to each other as new buds burst forth, the rich scent of soil nourished by last season’s leaf mould. The little river beside him, a tributary of Aros that flowed merrily down from the foothills near Aglon, ran icy-cold with snowmelt, but would soon teem with fish journeying upstream to spawn. White-petaled woodland stars and milkmaids coated the ground, interspersed here and there with early violets and bright yellow barberry flowers, and in such profusion that, had they been in Valinor, Celegorm would have taken it as a sign of Vána’s recent passing. Here, though, the flowers spoke not of her physical presence but of the changing season: the past winter had been one of the harshest since his arrival on these shores, but now spring was come to Beleriand, and the woods were waking to new growth.

Huan sniffed delicately at a clump of willow, and Celegorm’s sharp eyes noted what the hound’s nose had no doubt scented long before. Vána might not have walked here in living memory of the Eldar — but the elk they were tracking had. The willow was short and stunted by repeated browsing, and the broken-off shoots at its edges, still wet with sap, spoke of a recent meal. They were not far behind their quarry. 

He could have brought a larger party on this hunt, but he rather savoured this time in the woods with only Huan and Yavanna’s creatures for company. Of course, there was always the risk of encountering Orcs, but he trusted to the defenses he and Curufin had erected to the north, and to his own ability to deal with any minor pursuit that might make it through, to keep him safe. In the meantime, there was much yet to learn of how Yavanna’s creations had adapted to the advent of Sunlight and Moonlight, and to seasons both swifter and more extreme than those in Aman; and Celegorm would learn more unaccompanied by anyone other than the hound who knew him best. In the woods, he found the peace and stillness that had always escaped him in his parents’ houses, and that yet escaped him within the stone walls of the keep Curufin had designed.

Suddenly Huan’s head went up. Celegorm stilled. Had Huan sighted or scented something to be wary of? The hound was looking off to their right, crosswise to the wind, so if it was a scent he had caught, it might be difficult to catch again. Silently Celegorm drew an arrow from the quiver at his belt and nocked it, and then drew in a slow breath, listening intently and letting his eyes unfocus slightly to ensure that he would catch any movement in his periphery. The trees seemed unperturbed, so Orcs were unlikely, but the woods carried plenty of other dangers for the unwary.

Then, a group of ravens overhead, winging toward the river from the direction Huan was looking, gave him his answer. 

They were not the only hunters in these woods. 

“Wolves,” he murmured to the hound. Not the Morgoth’s creatures, who were as much perversions of the intelligent, cooperative animals he had known in Valinor as Orcs were of Elves, but an ordinary woodland pack. Worthy quarry nevertheless, especially as the hillsides where some of his people had begun grazing sheep and goats were not far away. With lambing season coming, the herds would surely present a tempting target for predators. “Shall we meet them at the river?” 

Huan shoved his nose at his hipbone in agreement, and together they set off again, Celegorm replacing his arrows as he followed the swift and silent footsteps of his companion. 

He estimated they were still some way from catching up to the wolf pack when a commotion downriver told him the wolves had intercepted their prey. A moment after the noise began, the elk burst from a stand of alders and charged across a shallow ford, the wolves close on its heels, driving it efficiently toward the opposite bank where steep and muddy slopes hemmed in a narrow, silty beach at the river’s edge. Celegorm was rather surprised to see only two wolves in pursuit, for last year he had seen signs of a much larger pack in the area; a bull elk with a full rack of antlers seemed ambitious quarry for so few hunters. And indeed, he watched one of the wolves only narrowly evade a goring as the elk, caught at bay, turned to fight. Was it the long winter that had decimated the pack and sent its remaining members after such formidable prey? 

He watched the battle with interest, reluctant to interfere, one hand on Huan’s back to still the hound, who was quivering with eagerness to join the fray. The elk, having sent one of its attackers rolling to evade its flying hooves, turned to attempt the slippery banks behind it — and that proved its undoing. It was halfway up when the second wolf lunged. Teeth sank into a powerful haunch, and the extra weight was enough to drag the elk crashing back to the ground. The first wolf, having recovered its feet, jumped for a briefly exposed throat, and the blood that spurted forth told Celegorm it had found an artery. 

The ravens that had first alerted him to the wolves’ presence alighted nearby with a cacophony of eager croaks as the wolves tore into their meal, too ravenous to care about Celegorm’s presence, if they noticed it, as he crept closer. He and Huan waited as they ate, careful to stay upwind. He could make his own kill now, he thought, but some instinct held him back. 

Instead he followed as they drew back, sated, returned to the near bank, and set off downriver, leaving the remains of their kill for the ravens. It was the season for pups; if he could stay on their tracks, they might lead him to their den. Once or twice the wolves nearly lost him, capable as they were of traveling faster through the woods even than an Elf, but always when he was on the verge of falling too far behind them, Huan picked up their tracks again.

As he had hoped, it was not far away. He and Huan had tracked the wolves no more than three leagues down the river, maintaining a careful distance, before they paused at an overhang anchored by a large boulder. One of the wolves — the female of the pair, he saw — slipped beneath it. Seeing his opportunity, Celegorm drew an arrow and took aim. 

Just as he was about to loose it, however, the she-wolf reemerged from the den, the muscles of her throat rippling oddly, and then disgorged a chunk of half-digested meat right at base of the boulder. Another chunk followed, a short distance farther from the den’s entrance. Easing his draw, Celegorm saw a small, wet nose emerge, followed by a pair of bright curious eyes, lopsided ears, and tentative and clumsy feet. The pup sniffed hungrily at the meat, though it seemed reluctant to leave the dark safety of the den, edging back almost as soon as it had fully emerged before starting hesitantly forward again. 

_Where are your siblings, little one?_ he wondered. The packs in Valinor had usually whelped three or four or even half a dozen pups in a single litter. 

No matter. He could check the den for the others once he had dealt with the one at the entrance, and its parents.

Suddenly, a thought not his own tugged at the edges of his consciousness. _Stay your hand, child._

It was his own mind that had put words to it, he realized, for the thought itself had come not in Quenya or Sindarin but in a flickering, rippling, liquid sort of music. It was not the voice of one of the _kelvar_ , though the birds continued to sing and beneath his feet small burrowing creatures were stirring in their tunnels. Nor had it come from the trees, for he knew their tones well enough though he did not speak their language as he could the birds’ and beasts’. Trees sounded warmer and thicker than the crisp, bell-like thought he had heard.

With a start he realized the river itself had spoken — or at any rate the Maia entwined with it. 

Slowly he replaced his arrow and knelt at the riverbank, holding his bow well clear of the water, and dipped his free hand into the swift, icy current. At once a series of images flashed into his mind: heavy snow pack on the mountains draining rapidly into the river’s headwaters with the lengthening days; water rising and banks growing sodden; roots woven through the river’s edge losing their hold as shrubs and sedges and stunted trees were overgrazed, and the current overflowing its banks as the loosened soil gave way. Then the image changed: now those same plants were struggling back to survival as the voracious grazers — elk and deer and moose — were forced to move quickly from tree to tree, chased by the scent and steps of lupine predators, unable to linger long enough to consume anything down to its roots. 

And finally, a picture of the wolves’ den, as clear as if he had knelt beneath the boulder and looked inside — with only a single pup within.

 _The winter took its toll on them, too,_ he realized. _They are few, this year, with fewer young._ It had not been something he had ever encountered in bountiful Valinor, but here it made sense. Perhaps there had been other pups who had not survived, or perhaps the she-wolf, herself under-nourished, had only carried but the one, her body lacking the resources to support more than a single additional life. _And they help you keep your course._

A ripple of assent from the river. As Celegorm watched, the pup came forward on short legs to tear hungrily at the piece of meat lying at the den’s entrance, and then, at a soft nudge of encouragement from its father, took another few steps forward until it stood fully outside, within reach of the second piece its mother had regurgitated. Beside him Huan’s throat vibrated with a sub-audible whine — no longer expressing, Celegrom realized, the instinct to hunt, but rather the desire to play. He found himself smiling.

 _Very well,_ he thought at last. _It will demand more watchers with our herds, but I will stay my hand, for now._ And the small settlements they had begun to establish along the rivers might escape flooding in the coming years; there was that, too.

The wind changed direction suddenly, and both adult wolves tensed as they caught the scent of Elf and hound, but Celegorm spoke a swift reassurance and retreated. With one last longing look at the small pack by the boulder, Huan heeded his signal and followed.

* * *

_Many Years Later_

Doriath was a cacophony of sound: the clash of steel on steel, shouts of pain and fury, heavy running footsteps, and the rumble of falling earth as its defenders collapsed tunnels on his and his brothers’ people — and all of it reflected and magnified and distorted by the twisting, echoing chambers through which he searched. The floor was slick, with blood or worse.

Unlike the others, he did not run. The bearer of the Silmaril, the whelp of Lúthien and her mortal lover, had come this way, he knew, just as he knew better than to let the distractions woven into Doriath’s defenses overwhelm him and turn him from his path. But tracking quarry through this infernal maze was harder by far than tracking beasts through the woods, for there at least he could trust the trails he followed and the tracks left by his quarry; here, any supposed trail might simply be a lure for a deadly trap. Slowing his breath, he listened, sifting through the myriad sounds assaulting his ears, and let his vision soften so that he might catch any movement in the tunnel. 

There.

A hitched breath, coming from behind the doorway to his left, and a twitch of cloth as the end of a cloak was snatched hastily out of sight. 

He followed the sound into a workshop of some sort; tools lay scattered on workbenches where their wielders had abandoned them as they ran to their city’s defence. The slightly ajar door of a low cabinet gave the game away.

He crouched silently, peering into the crack of the door. The figures hiding within were small, huddled close to each other, and barely visible except for their wide, frightened eyes, eyes that had never seen Aman yet held a faint spark of its light — an inheritance from their grandmother, child of a Calaquendë and an Ainu. How old were Nimloth and Dior’s children? And where was whoever was supposed to be guarding them, who had left them to seek sanctuary, alone, in an abandoned workshop? He edged closer.

They flinched from his sword.

Hostages, he thought, cold and sharp; surely their father would not withhold the Silmaril if it meant his sons’ lives…

And then, as though from a great distance, came a memory he had thought buried with the departure of the warm, steady, loyal presence that had accompanied him all the way from Valinor — a memory of a lilting, icy-clear, musically rippling voice.

_Stay your hand, child…_

With aching slowness he lowered his sword. One pair of eyes within the cupboard followed his hand as he stretched it out as far away from himself as he could reach and set the sword down on the floor. The other pair of eyes never left his own. Hesitant hope flared to life amid the terror and defiance in the gaze locked on his. 

If he could just get them out… like the pup lured from the safety of its den by the promise of food and its parents’ comforting presence…

He had no food, nor toys with which to lure them, and he knew not whether their parents yet lived.

Softly he trilled a few notes of birdsong. It was the song of the nightingale, the song for which their grandfather had given their grandmother the name _Tinúviel_ , years ago in the woods of their home, before their family’s destiny ever became caught up with Silmarils and Oaths. 

Now both pairs of eyes were staring at him, and both were lit with hope.

He whistled another phrase of the song.

One hesitant hand pushed the cabinet door an inch further open.

Once more, he gave the nightingale-call.

This time it drowned out the near-silent footsteps behind him. 

He felt the blade slide into his back between his ribs as a voice behind him said, with all the vicious fury of a she-wolf whose cubs are threatened: “Get away from them.” 

He might have reached his sword if he hadn’t set it down so far away, but Nimloth kicked it from his reach as she drove her own deeper. It was not the stroke of a trained warrior, for she had not aimed true for his heart, but it had strength of desperation behind it, and through the white-hot pain that immediately became most of his existence he realized, dimly, that it would not take him long to drown in his own blood.

More footsteps pounded into the room, not troubling to be quiet, and from where he had fallen, face-forward with his head turned at an awkward angle, he saw Caranthir’s boots, and Curufin’s. Others, too, that he didn’t recognize — folk of Doriath come to defend their queen. Blood bubbled up between his lips. Someone was shouting his name but he had no breath to answer them. He had strength only to push the cabinet door closed, that he might spare the children inside the sight of whatever might follow, before the light in his own eyes went out.

When his soldiers arrived mere minutes later, the fighting was long over. The only people they could see were the dead. 

Among them was Celegorm, eyes open and empty, hair and armour darkened with his own blood, one hand outstretched like a signpost toward a low cabinet in the corner of the room.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was very much influenced by RaisingCaiin's take on Celegorm at Doriath in "neither law, nor love, nor league of swords".
> 
> Wolves are in fact known to perform the erosion prevention function Celegorm learns about here.


End file.
